Welcome to the Fantasy Zone
Space Harrier XE is my homage to Sega's fabulous arcade shoot 'em up game from 1985 - Space Harrier. It's being (slowly) developed for the Atari XL and XE series of 8-bit computers with 64KB or more memory, which narrowly missed out on a version at the time by becoming obsolete.
Arcade Space Harrier
Atari XL/XE Version
Playable Work in Progress Demo of Stage 1 was released in April 2002 as an Atari 130XE only disk image. The goal is to continue to develop and evolve the demo routines into an enhanced cartridge based version of the full game (if not a real cartridge, then at least a cartridge image that will run on emulators).
April 2002 Stage 1 Demo
Latest Status
19th March 2008
People on AtariAge Forums were wondering what had happened to various game projects, including Space Harrier, so I thought I'd better reply there, although I was hoping to have a lot more to show before posting an update:
"Space Harrier is still alive. No updates on the site though as its pretty minimal news - sorry to disappoint, but (another) major graphics engine rewrite to try and minimize slow down with Stereo RMT music has taken a long while, and I haven't added any extra stages beyond stage 4 yet. I don't intend to do that many (news) updates, but now the rewrite is done there should be more visible progress to share over the coming months. It will take as long as it takes, but I will lose my mind if I don't finish this soon - I just realised I've been 8 years doing this multicolour version now!"
- Stage 5, the Uriah dragon riding stage has been improved over the earlier version from a couple of years ago. I had to slow the frame rate down on that version as Uriah is made of a lot of rather large sprites. But several graphics engine changes have helped a lot with that, and it runs the same speed (15fps) as the other early stages now.
- Made PAL and NTSC versions almost identical in speed now, by using mixed frame rates and adjustments to RMT playback.
- Most of Sal's music is in the game now. There's a few refinements to be made to volume levels, and some of the sound effect tunes (EG tune in movie at end of Stage 4), but Sal has got something much closer now.
- Figured out how to patch RMT so it will play a Stereo song at a decent speed when there is only a single Pokey.
- Left my own sound effects engine in the game rather than RMT as I need a bit more control over the 1 channel that's left for the sound effects. I couldn't find a good way in RMT to resume a sound effect when interrupted by another. (That may just be me though.)
- Music continues playing when Samples are played now. (Quite pleased with getting that working!)
- Seem to have finally nailed some rare crash bugs that were happening with the new graphics engine. That took about a week of hair pulling to finally figure out.
- Lots of minor changes making it closer to the original.
Things should be getting more interesting soon (for me anyway!), as I will be finally making a new Stage (6) that isn't just an update of ones I did a couple of years ago. I haven't thought of any other radical improvements that I want to try out, and most of the most complex code is already written, so hopefully new Stages should come quicker now.
I finally figured out how to make a reasonable quality video of the game that didn't suffer badly from flickering, so although I'm not much good at Web stuff, I thought I'd try adding some of those embedded Flash movies that everyone seems to have on their sites these days. Please have a look at them in the new Movies area.
Thanks for all the support and encouragement so far everybody. If you have any interest in Atari consoles or computers I'd thoroughly recommend a visit to AtariAge, where there is lots of information and an active community of enthusiasts.
25-Oct-02
